for the clearfield high school class of 1968

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Copyrighted 2009 © by Robert C. Gross. All rights reserved.

For the Clearfield High School Class of 1968

From classmate, Bob Gross, in gratitude for many friendships and memories; to those living and those who’ve passed on

We’ve had a tremendous nostalgic opportunity the past couple of days to

become re-acquainted with old friends, and relive many school year memories

– the good, bad, and the not so good. We’ve also had a tremendous chance to

catch up on each other and on our families.

We’re once again reminded that each of us has very distinct and

individual memories of growing up in the 50's and the 60's and of the school

years we shared together. But we’re also reminded of how many we have to

share.

We’re all now referred to as “Aging Boomers”. Wow, just what we’ve

always want to be – “aging”! Maybe we should be thought of as being in

“middle middle age”. But some labels are not self-chosen, and most of us are

happy just to be called something!

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One thing we know for certain, however, is that we are the children of the

“Greatest Generation”, those men and women who were born or grew up

during the Great Depression, who, along with their families and loved ones,

met its greatest economic hardships, and later met liberty’s call to face the

greatest calamity of modern times, World War II. To us, they left us their

lessons of hard work, frugality, loyalty, perseverance, and patriotism. Many

are gone now, and more are leaving us daily. Yet, they leave us a rich legacy

that we must never forget, and we owe it to them to pass on their lessons to

our children, grandchildren, and generations to come.

Some of us were born in the last year of the ‘40s. The events of the ‘40s

would shape, shade, and color the last half of the twentieth century and, most

certainly, all of our lives. Most of us, however, were born in the first year of the

decade known as the “Fabulous ‘50s”, a decade initiated by the outbreak of yet

another hot war – this one in far away Korea. The ‘50s were dominated by a

growing civil rights movement, the escalation of a Cold War and global arms

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race, and with it, a threat and fear of nuclear annihilation which would hover

over our generation until we were nearly in our 40s.

Yet, the 1950's also represented, as historians are fond of telling us, a

rest stop in the cataclysmic events of the before and the after of the 20th

Century. During that decade, we experienced hope and prosperity, tranquility

and affordability, a raised national living standard for most, and the rise of the

modern age of technology.

There seemed to be unlimited possibilities, heights to be climbed, and

through our childhood lenses, an innocence resonating with the sights and

sounds of family, loved ones and friends. Memories of events that affected or

touched our lives during the years that we spent in various grade schools remind

us that the ‘50's are said to be that last era of real complacency before the

eruption of changes that were to be at last ushered in by the tumultuous

cacophony of events of the 1960's.

Many of us remember the smiling grandfatherly president of the 1950's, a

larger than life hero from that most terrible of all wars, who presided over the

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America and provided us an image of the way all presidents should look and

smile. Many of us may vaguely recall hearing the news announcing to a

shocked America and world, in 1957, that the Soviets had won the initial battle

of the space race by launching a basketball size orbiting spacecraft called

Sputnik.

The economic ascendancy of American prosperity was in the air as we

came to dominate the world’s economic stage. Air transportation came of age.

Communications and telecommunications advanced with the speed of

lightening, a precursor of things to come. Our childhood generation was the

first generation of children to grow up with an electronic babysitter, as

television came of age.

Speaking of telecommunications, some of us remember a certain Sunday

in the mid-50s, when, together with our families, we watched as Ed Sullivan

introduced a young, slick-haired Mississippi-born singer who swayed and

wiggled as teenage girls shrieked, swooned and fainted. He became known as

the King - and changed the face of music for our generation and all time,

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preparing for the rocketing popularity of the music of our generation – rock and

roll. Others would follow, including a group of four mopped-hair British singers

who also appeared on the Sullivan show some years later.

Remember our first toys - coon skin caps, Barbie dolls, brightly colored

hula hoops, games of all kinds, our first bikes or sleds, or our first toy soldier or

6-shooters?

There were our childhood television favorite programs - "Fury”, "Sky

King," "My Friend Flicka," "Superman," "Howdy Doody," "The Mickey Mouse

Club,” “I Love Lucy,” and "Leave It To Beaver,” and our parents – usually after

we were sent to bed - watched the "Milton Berle Show," "Your Show of

Shows," "The Alcoa Hour." And families gathered around the sets for programs

like "Gunsmoke,” "Ozzie and Harriet," "Father Knows Best," and, later,

“Bonanza,” Perry Mason,” and popular sit-coms.

We also remember when it was tradition for us to bring small transistor

radios to our classrooms and listen to the Fall Baseball Classic, which was then

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still largely played during the daytime and still played in what still seemed to be

late summer!

As the 1960's began, we were in the 5th grade, and during the fall, we

were witness to television’s first presidential debates and the subsequent

election of a youthful, urbane president, who, along with his charming wife and

family, ushered in the age of Camelot. With youthful exuberance, the new

president talked of the grand hopes for the new decade, filled with promise and

seemingly unlimited possibilities. He wanted to get the country moving again in

a new era of action, change, and service. He spoke of defending America and

her allies, and our “willingness to pay any price or bear any burden” in defense

of freedom. He pledged to put an American on the surface of the moon by the

end of that decade, a pledge ultimately fulfilled. In the early ‘60s we sat in our

classrooms enthralled as astronauts Alan Shephard and John Glenn were among

the first American heroes to explore the vast reaches of outer space. Later, at

the end of the decade, we thrilled along with mankind everywhere when Neil

Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin setting foot on the surface of the moon with “a small

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step for man and a large leap for mankind.” The 60's were both the beginning

and the peak of America's fascination with space exploration.

Yet, with all of the excitement ushered in by America’s space race with the

Soviets, another, more sobering and terrifying even occurred in the fall of 1962.

The world came as close as it ever was to come to the horror of nuclear

annihilation in October of that year during the Cuban missile crisis when

America and the Soviet Union stood eyeball to eyeball on the brink of nuclear

war, and then stood down.

The America of the ‘60's came to be dominated by two overarching

historical themes: the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam.

The explosive and often tragic march of the civil rights movement found

new life in the ‘50s when several pivotal events ushered in the movement of

the ‘60s. A young woman named Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of a bus

in Montgomery, Alabama and was arrested. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed

the separate but equal doctrine which had been the law of the land for over

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fifty years when it ruled in Brown v. the Board of Education that separate could

not, did not and would not mean equal.

And, across the globe, as the French were defeated and retreated in the

late ‘50s from their former Indo-Chinese empire, America stepped into what it

perceived to be a breach in the bridgehead to stop the spread of Communism.

First, with a build-up of American military advisors sent to advise the fledgling

South Vietnamese government’s military, and later with the Gulf of Tonkin

incident in 1964 serving as a pretext, America would engage in a massive

escalation of U.S. troops in Vietnam, as we became the principle antagonist in

an undeclared war to stop communism that we would ultimately stop by

stepping away from after we lost nearly 55,000 American lives.

Those events would permeate, above all else, America’s national

landscape and state of mind during our teenage years and beyond.

In 1962, we started junior high school, all of us together in one school for

the first time. Each of us can recall the trauma of adolescence, accompanied by

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its changes in our bodies, minds, voices, and those eruptions of skin warfare that

would plague us for years to come.

In the middle of our eighth grade year, America’s sense of innocence and

our own individual sense of security would be drastically altered by one

immensely horrific and historical tragedy. No one among us will ever forget

what he was doing, where she was, what he or she thought, or the awful sense

of personal and national loss that we each felt when we heard the tragic news

from Dallas on November 22, 1963. For many of us, that day marks the day in

our lives from which we mark a personal sense of loss, when all world, national,

local and personal events seemed suspended surrealistically in time. Its tragic

legacy would sear the remaining years of the 60's and beyond.

Yet, within months, as salve its mourning, the youth of America would

welcome, with an outpouring of national hysteria, the onslaught of Beatle

mania as a way of supplicating itself with a balm to heal our national

heartache.

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In the fall of 1964, we separated into two junior high schools as we

completed the 9th grade and a year later we reunited, once again, as we started

our high school years as sophomores.

At the same time, around the country, questions were being posed about

America's values, the "system", and commitments we had made across the

seas. That was not new. America questioned herself after each of the previous

tragic wars of this century. What was new was the manner in which we

challenged ourselves. A counter-culture began to develop. Yet, as high

schoolers we were – for the most part – sheltered from such events.

Most of us enjoyed the things we were supposed to enjoy about high

school sports, school events, dating, not dating, homework, no homework, a

first car, or not having a car. Many of us faced our own sense of mortality for

the first time just after our sophomore year, when one of our favorite

classmates and good friends lost her life in a tragic motorcycle accident.

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It seems now that in all-too-brief span of three years, we moved from our

sophomore year, through our junior year, and on to the conclusion of our

senior year of high school.

And as we moved toward the culmination of our high school years, we

began to look ahead toward our individual futures, contemplating more of

what lay ahead in our worlds and in the world at large. Some of us were

already thinking about plans to start families; others were planning on

continuing their education after high school; others were planning on serving

our country; others were planning on starting careers; and still others had no

plans whatsoever beyond where they might hang out when the upper parking

lot was no longer available to them.

And, then less than mid-way through our senior year, the calendar page

moved forward from 1967, and we rang in a momentus new year.

1968 --oh, what a year!

Commentators are fond of saying that 1968 had the vibrations of an

earthquake about it. America shuddered with a mind-numbing sequence of

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tossing and turning events of that year. History cracked open with the

separation of generations and generational values. Suppressed bats of history

came flapping out of the deepest caves, carrying with them dark surprises.

American culture and politics ventured into dangerous regions - in ascents of

new enlightenment for some and rapid descents into quicksands of historical

apocalypse for others. The year was monumental and it was messy. It produced

vivid theater and reverberates still in the American mind. The year began with

promise and hope and yet a sense of darkening shadows. The country was

enmeshed in its longest and most unpopular war. The civil rights movement

was evolving and changing - and all amidst a growing clamor from many, who

excoriated our leaders with demands either to change or make room for those

who would effect change.

Americans and our post-war psyche of triumph and power received a

thunderous jolt on January 23, when the North Koreans defiantly captured an

American Navy vessel, the Pueblo, and all of her crew, and held them brutally

captive for most of that year, as we watched, seethed, and fumed helplessly.

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Then, just a few days later, violating its own truce and cease fire, the North

Vietnamese launched the Lunar New Year Tet Offensive on January 30,

attacking, overrunning and capturing towns or places whose names jar yet our

memories - Hue, De Nang, Saigon – before being thrown back and defeated by

American forces.

Yet, the Tet Offensive, while a defeat for the North Vietnamese, resonated

with Americans as a defeat and proved to be a turning point in America’s will to

fight as it served as a stark and vivid realization to many Americans, that we

were, perhaps, involved in a quagmire of resources and manpower that was

sapping the strength, youth, and vitality of post-war America. More and more

Americans, young and old, began to question the wisdom of America’s

commitment to Vietnam, especially after Walter Cronkite, America’s “trusted

uncle” – in a moment of journalistic history - challenged America's role in Asia

on one of his nightly news broadcasts.

Thereafter, the events of 1968 spewed forth historical events in a

continuous and mind-numbing chaotic eruption:

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• On March 12, a Senator named Eugene McCarthy won the New

Hampshire presidential primary, defeating an incumbent president

• On March 31, President Johnson, with the famous words, "I will not

seek nor will I accept the nomination," announced his decision not to

seek re-election, driven to do so by national and international events

he could not seem to manage, control, or even understand.

• A few days later, on a Memphis motel balcony, the symbol of the civil

rights movement and a moderate voice for peaceful, nonviolent

change, Martin Luther King, was gunned down on a Memphis motel

balcony. America's cities reacted violently.

• On April 23, protesting students captured the Administration

Buildings at Columbia University protesting the war and espousing

distrust for anyone over the age of 30.

• On June 6, Robert F. Kennedy was senselessly gunned down, just

after winning the California Democratic primary. Less than six weeks

before, some of us had heard him tell us, while he was speaking at

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Weber State College, "that the youthfulness I speak of is not a time

of life, but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the

imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the

appetite for adventure over love of ease. It does not accept the

failures of today as a reason for the cruelties of tomorrow. It believes

that one man can make a difference and that men of good will

working together can grasp the future and mold it to our will."

• In early August, Richard Nixon became the Republican presidential

nominee. Later in August, we witnessed on television the brutal and

tragic trauma of a political party and a whole city being torn asunder

during the Chicago riots of the Democratic National Convention.

• In October, we recall American athletes at the Olympic games in

Mexico City holding aloft gloved fists, defiantly saluting black power

and signaling a change of course for the civil rights movement.

• In early November, Richard Nixon was elected president; and

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• Finally, on December 24, Christmas Eve, many of us remember the

three Apollo VIII astronauts who circled the moon for the first time,

recited the story of the Creation, offered us the Lord's prayer and

wished to all peace on earth and good will toward men.

Not all of the events of 1968 were so tragic or so solemn or so serious. A

new Broadway musical, “Hair”, opened that year and ushered in the Age of

Aquarius. We were still listening to their last album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely

Hearts Club Band”, when the Beatles released their double White album late in

the year. "Mrs. Robinson," by Simon and Garfunkel, from the movie “The

Graduate” was one of the number one hits of the year. Eric Clapton still sang

with a group called Cream; Steven Stills and Neal Young were still with Buffalo

Springfield; David Crosby was still with the Byrds; the Rolling Stones were still

the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys were still the Beach Boys. Jimi Hendrix,

Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison of the Doors were among our favorites. In the

brief future all three would be dead from drug overdoses, unfortunate players

in a scourge of the times.

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We watched the two top television bits of the season - "Batman and

Robin" and "Martin's Laugh-In," and laughed along with the slogans of the day -

"Sock It To Me!" and "You Bet Your Sweet Bippy!"

1968 was more than a densely compacted cascade of events and

more than an accidental astrological alignment; it was an explosion of change, a

struggle between generations. To some extent, it was a war between the past

and the future, and, for an entire generation, a violent struggle to grow up. It

prepared the way for beginnings. The complex and chaotic events of the ‘60's

would live in the American mind long after the melodrama was over and those

who had burned with passions of change went on to become parents and

grandparents.

1968 was a blade that severed the past from the future, the then from the

now - the “then” of triumphant post-war American power in the world and of

the nation's illusions of innocence and virtue, and a more complicated “now” of

post Vietnam and post-Cold War globalization.

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In 1968, a huge tribe of the young revolted against the nation's elders and

authorities, and the nation finished killing its heroes. American innocence and

virtue found new forms and found new skins.

The events of 1968 impacted the Class of ‘68 and shaped our adult lives

in different ways and with different meanings.

Yet, for most of us, these events were still, at the time, largely the

concerns of older generations and shadows of tomorrow’s concerns. We were

still largely unaffected by world events as we finished the innocence of our

youth.

For each of us, memories of our school years at Clearfield High mean

different things, recall individual memories, and would affect each of us in

unique and separate ways. For some of us, our high school years were more

painful than pleasant; for others, they were, as Bruce Springsteen says, our

“Glory Days". We each may have experienced successes or failures, large or

small.

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To go back in time, each of us would likely do some things differently,

change some decisions, take back some of the things we said to others, or re-

invent ourselves in the hindsight of maturity and wisdom. For we are human

and it is the province of all humans to make mistakes.

We realize now in the halo of wisdom then consigned to our futures that

the mistakes, offenses, or slights of our youth were, in fact, some of our best

teachers and preparation for our own children. Our insecurities - sometimes

masked by shyness, sometimes by bravado - while painful at times, paled and

dimmed as we assumed and met challenges of adulthood. From what we

learned, we taught our own children that such things should temper rather than

scar. We also learned that “less” is often better than “more”; that “selflessness”

trumps “selfishness”; and that “humility” is more attractive than “arrogance”.

Many of life’s most important lessons were reserved for the years after

high school. That is the way of things. And, now, forty plus years later, with our

expanding waistlines, receding or graying hairlines and wrinkles and crinkles, we

can look back at the events of the ‘60’s with warmer, softer and fuzzier lenses of

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warm nostalgia that is enhanced by the wisdom that comes from experience

that allows us to be more comfortable in our own skin. And we know that even

now we can continue to learn even as we continue to make mistakes, if only we

allow ourselves to continue to grow, for we know that the potential of our

growth is neither limited nor measured by the chronology of time. That

potential can only be limited only by the cessation of our imaginations.

To the class of '68, however, one thing is certain. For each of us, 1968

marked an end and it marked a beginning. We said goodbye to each other and

our childhoods and we said hello to our futures. That is, perhaps, what we

collectively and individually remember most importantly about 1968.

So now, forty-one years later, here's to you - to the Green and White, to

the Falcons of 1968, to those who are here and those who are not, and those

who live on and those who are gone!

Thank you for this opportunity and for listening as I’ve attempted to share

some of our collective legacy with you. May God bless you and your families in

the years to come!

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for the clearfield high school class of 1968

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